mathematician, however much he may see the desirability of becoming one.
And many a man may in the moral sphere see the advisability of his being
different in character from what he is, but may altogether lack the
capacity of becoming such. And the power of choice differs not only with
each individual, but with the same individual at different times.
Finally, the more fixed the character of the individual the less
conscious he is of choice, or of a sense of freedom to do differently
from what he actually does, and as this applies with equal force to
character, whether it be good or bad, we reach, finally, the suicidal
position that the more fundamentally moral a man becomes, the less moral
he is.[5]

Now seeing that all our educational processes aim at making the good
character, so to speak, automatic, that is, to quite fill the mind with
worthy motives and wise power of choice, and seeing also that a
character is good so far as this is done, will some one explain in what
way moral character would have suffered had God so made man that he
would have had intelligence enough to always choose the good and reject
the bad? For, be it noted, the apology put forward for the present state
of affairs is that man is in a state of probation, he is passing through
a course of moral discipline, and it is essential that he should
experience the possibility to do wrong, and even to occasionally do the
wrong. And the end of the process of tuition is, what? The production of
a perfect being in whom there shall not be a proneness to do wrong, to
whose purified moral nature wrong doing shall be quite foreign. That is
to say that we are to reach as a result of this long roundabout process,
with all its waste and bungling, just what might have been established
at the beginning. For either the perfect moral being is without the
quality which we have just been assured is essential to morality, or the
whole argument is reduced to nonsense.

For it is impossible to assume that the bad man chooses to be bad with a
full perception of the consequences of his actions, and at the same time
with the power to do otherwise. We all agree that the _right_ choice is
ultimately a _wise_ choice, and that if we could all trace out the
consequences of all we do, we should realise that it was to our real
interest to act rightly. And if that is admitted, it follows that the
"choice" to do evil is the product of short-sightedness, or of some
defect of temperame